Sunday, 15 May 2016

Ricardo Vidort passed away in May 2006. I’m still hoping the website will appear this year, but since Jantango told me that much of the material is already online I thought it might be a good idea to put together links to all the available online material. I hope this will make it more accessible.

I’ve divided the links into three sections. First (of course) links to dance, dances in milongas first. My problem is finding the original link, which I’ve used wherever possible, but I simply don’t have time to go through all the repostings to find which is the first. & I’ve tried to put them in chronological order, but there’s not always adequate information. If any of these links are to your material and you’d like me to use your original link, tell me. & if I’ve missed anything, or got something wrong, please let me know.

After the dances, films of Ricardo talking, and finally links to transcripts of interviews. For these two sections we owe Jantango a lot of thanks, as she's given us a great opportunity to ‘meet’ Ricardo and hear him talking.

This isn’t all the material that exists. McGarry filmed frequently in the milongas, so it’s likely he has more than the six clips in Tango and Chaos, and his recordings are good quality for 2001-4 video in dark places. (In fact he says it was hard to start writing about Ricardo because ‘...there’s so much video’.) I know of two private sources which haven’t been made public for various reasons, and there’s certainly more from his teaching tours of the USA. However, I think these links to material that’s already available give us an excellent picture of Ricardo and his dance and I hope this collection will be useful. I used to think there wasn’t much material and I was surprised how long this list became! There are seven clips of Ricardo dancing in milongas, in addition to the demos and some wonderful videos of him talking, so it is an extensive and valuable archive.

1) As an introduction, here’s Muma talking about Ricardo (with subtitles). Muma danced and taught with Ricardo for a number of years. This is a four-minute extract with subtitles from Jantango's 24-minute interview with Muma for those who can follow castellano, as it's without subtitles. A lot of thanks both to Muma and to Jantango for making this available.

(Updated 30/05/2016.)

MILONGAS

The earliest and best (I think!) are from milongas in 2001. These are all rather fragmentary and the video quality isn’t great, but the dancing is.

5 Just for completeness: Ricardo at Club Latino. This video is from Jantango’s private videos, and this is a copy. However, it’s only a very general view of the milonga floor and Ricardo hardly appears.

9 These two videos are from an event at Centro Leonesa to celebrate Ricardo’s 64th year of tango, so perhaps around 2003. Ricardo Vidort and Miriam Pincen: this is the well-known dance to Canaro’s Chique in Centro Leonesa. Undated.

13 It’s said that Ricardo Vidort and Osvaldo Cartery were friends at the time they were developing their tango, and used to practice together. It’s wonderful someone was around with a camera when they reprised that practice.

14 Copied from Tango and Chaos: Ricardo with Alexandra Todaro. Worth including here because it loads faster than on the site. YouTube wasn’t available pre-2005 when McGarry was developing his site.

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Finally, a compilation Myriam Pincem posted two years ago. It starts out with a demo in Centro Leonesa that I hadn’t seen before. It’s a new video to me, but unfortunately it’s quite badly filmed, very dark, and the dancing is obscured by captions telling us that it’s Ricardo dancing with Myriam.

This is followed at 1:50 by what might be another version of the marvellous Chique, Ricardo with Myriam in Centro Leonesa. I’m not sure. It includes Ricardo and Myriam entering the floor, so it’s a more complete version than the version posted by chrissjj which I linked to above (no. 9). Otherwise, it’s generally poorer quality, so it could be from another camera. Oscar Casas posted the video of the group demo which followed Ricardo and Myriam dancing Chique that evening (no. 10), so it’s possible that the version Myriam posts here is different and comes from him. Chique is followed at 5:39 by the demo I’ve posted as no. 10 above.